Let He Who Is without Sin Judge Others

Flannery O'Connor, Self Potrait

Flannery O'Connor, Self Potrait

Spiritual Sunday

Jackie Paskow, a former colleague from the Foreign Language Department, recently mentioned to me a Flannery O’Connor story that had made an impact on her. We normally visit the Paskows on Sunday evenings—Alan is my friend who has cancer—but as we are out of town for the week, I thought I’d send her, and you, this reflection on “Revelation.” Consider it a Lenten meditation on a story with a message that all Americans, in our excessive judgment of each other, need to hear.

“Revelation” has the black humor that marks much of O’Connor’s fiction. Mrs. Turpin (Mrs. Turpitude? Jackie asks) is a large and imposing woman who is visiting the doctor’s office with her husband Claud, who has been kicked by a cow. We watch the casual dialogue amongst the waiting patients and listen in as well to Mrs. Turpin’s thoughts. Many of these are of the “thank you God for not making me like these other people” variety. One launching inspiration for the story may be Jesus’s parable about the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not like the tax collector miserably berating himself for a sinner. As I recall the parable (I’m not around the internet at the moment and so can’t check), Jesus tells his disciples that the tax collector will get to Heaven before the Pharisee does.

Like the smug Pharisee, Mrs. Turpin has no doubt that God has blessed her by making her neither white-trash nor black. O’Connor writes:

Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said? . . . She would have wriggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”

And a little further on:

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a boxcar, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.

Although she is friendly enough as she converses with the other waiting room patients, something about Mrs. Turpin communicates her sense of superiority, and we watch the women, as it were, jockey for position. A “white-trashy woman” with a sick son, undoubtedly picking up on Mrs. Turpin’s contempt, uses every occasion she can find to voice her superiority–not only over African Americans but over those who cater to African Americans. Therefore, Mrs. Turpin mentioning that she and Claud raise the hogs on concrete, hosing them down periodically, and, later, that they serve ice water to their black help, elicits this response:

“One thang I know,” the white-trash woman said.  “Two thangs I ain’t going to do: love no niggers or scoot down no hog with no hose.”  And she let out a bark of contempt.

The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged indicated they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things.”

This “pleasant” middle class lady is there with her daughter, a Wellesley college student home for the summer. As the story progresses, the girl fixates a scowl upon Mrs. Turpin. At a climactic moment, when Mrs. Turpin feels called upon to testify to God her gratitude for having made her who she is, the girl flings her book at her and then launches herself upon her.

The girl has to be pulled off and the doctor administers a sedative, but before she falls asleep, she delivers one last blow:

The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.

Mrs. Turpin receives the assault as some kind of message from God. It’s as though someone has finally seen through all her posturing and called her out for who she really is. Later that day while hosing down her hogs, she screams at God for having singled her out. Sounding perhaps like the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son, she argues,

It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.

Her internal pain, stemming from a lifetime of worrying that perhaps the girl is right, explodes at the end of her rant. “Go on,” she yells to God, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top, There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

And then to top it all off: “Who do you think you are?”

She’s a bit like Job here, calling out in the midst of doubt and misery. But the answer she gets back is a healing one, all the more so because it seems comic. The divine truths we receive have to be in terms that we can recognize them, and this revelation comes in a package that she can recognize:

There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, onto the descending dusk.  She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound.  A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.  They alone were on key.  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned awy.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.  In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house.  In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

I can imagine that, when writing the story, O’Connor initially identified with the college student, furious at all the smug holier-than-thou types around her, How often in her violent fantasies must she she have fantasied sinking her nails in their fat necks. And yet there is sympathy as well for the tormented insecurity of Mrs. Turpin. If we judge harshly, it is because we ourselves are terrified of being judged.

America as a country is obsessed with class. As I look at the “white-trash” racism that I grew up with in the south—I remember seeing it expressed by the McBees and the Hobacks—I detect now their own anger at feeling themselves judged. When I look at the some of the vituperation being hurled President Obama, a black man who (as Rush Limbaugh sees it) wants to pull down our pants and give us a whipping, I see this fear.

But why go to people different than me? When I see a faculty colleague getting on a high horse or throwing a temper tantrum, often it comes out of this fear of being judged. In fact, I recognize my own insecure complacency and my own defensive judgmentalism in Mrs. Turpin.

I would be better off, and our society and world would be better off, if we could look past the exteriors and see each fellow human being as a holy soul, ascending to glory each in our own particular style. We may all be fools, but there is something holy in a fool. Note that everyone is headed this time to heaven and not to gas ovens. If we all buy into Mrs. Turpin’s revelation, healing conversations would begin.

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